NNSquad - Network Neutrality Squad
[ NNSquad ] Re: The disappearing web: Information decay is eating away our history
here's my take on "bit rot" - it is more a problem of software that can
still interpret the bits than anything else. One can keep rewriting bits
but making sure the applications are still around and running to interpret
them is hard. Solving this problem turns up all kinds of legal and business
issues. I also agree that the legal "discovery" system is leading to
wholesale policies of deletion of digitized content after a fixed period of
time and that's going to frustrate historians and each of us when we are
trying to remember something from 5-10-20 years ago...
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oTnAKUMFvKw
vint
[ Especially note the short video linked above where Vint discusses
this topic.
-- Lauren Weinstein
NNSquad Moderator ]
On Sun, Sep 23, 2012 at 4:43 PM, Jerry Leichter <leichter@lrw.com> wrote:
> It's not just the Web, and much of it has nothing (directly) to do with
> technology.
>
> I just finished reading a wonderful history of Bell Labs (The Idea
> Factory, by Jon Gertner). One of the things that made it possible to write
> this history - and helps bring it alive in quotations - is the availability
> of decades-old documents: Memos, notes of discussions, internal studies.
> We don't have to guess why Bell Labs spent many years pursuing
> millimeter-wave waveguide technology (which was all ultimately discarded in
> favor of fiber optics): We can read all the discussions.
>
> Thirty years from now, if someone wants to write a history of how some
> startup came to be a giant, they will find very little. All the discussion
> was in e-mail or in other electronic forms - and all such discussions were
> discarded after a couple of years because of fear that it would end up in
> court. Ever since Microsoft's ordeal before a court as message after
> embarrassing internal message was entered into the public record, the
> universal recommendation of corporate attorneys is to establish a document
> destruction policy and engage in it consistently. In the Apple/Samsung
> trial, it emerged the Samsung's email system was configured to purge mail
> after a very short time (something like 2 weeks) unless an employee
> deliberately saved it.
>
> When documents were on paper, the task of searching through and indexing
> huge numbers of them was so daunting as to be impractical. (Companies
> being sued in fact made it a practice to over-deliver documents, knowing
> their adversaries would have trouble finding the relevant data in all the
> junk.) Back when the US Department of Justice sued IBM for anti-trust, CDC
> joined in with a private lawsuit. Apparently CDC had the technological
> wherewithal - and forward-looking lawyers - to create a computer index of
> the blizzard of documents that IBM delivered. One morning, it was
> announced that IBM and CDC had settled. DoJ learned to their chagrin that
> the settlement included the requirement that CDC immediately destroy its
> index - and by the time the announcement came out, the index was gone.
>
> Today, everything is digital and the courts have required that it be
> delivered in standardized, machine-readable formats unless you can show
> that's impractical. (Yes, for there were companies that, when ordered to
> produce records they kept electronically, printed them out and delivered
> paper by the truckload. They can no longer do that.) All this is great
> from the point of view of the court system - but a side effect will be for
> us to have a very impoverished view of our own history. Ironic, given that
> we now have a much better ability to preserve and usefully access this
> history than we ever did in the past!
>
> -- Jerry
>
>
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